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Post by Beriadan on May 12, 2024 11:11:12 GMT
On request, a section of the training grounds had been filled with an array of straw targets and Mu ren zhueng style wooden training dummies. It was laid out almost like an obstacle course, one to test agility and maneuverability as well as accuracy and strength of will.
Yoichi took a deep breath as she stood at the start. Tried to clear her mind of the thoughts that filled it, pressing on the corners of her sanity like the banks of a river in spring, holding back the flood. She activated her quirk, little finger and thumb transforming into a bow, and began.
Her movements were swift, firing off arrow after arrow as she weaved in and out of the moving dummies, which swung their wooden arms towards her. She ducked, leapt, swerved away, took a blow to the shoulder and fell hard on her backside.
"Weak. Pathetic."
Yoichi got to her feet and started again. The sound of flying arrows filled the air, as she loosed one after the other. She had to get better. Stronger. Her original goal had been to reach Number One, to be the best of the best, but that goal was beyond her. Yoichi hadn't realised how many amazing people stood in her way, each one working just as hard. She couldn't get to that spot, but really, did she want to?
"What else is there in life other than being the best? Stupid girl. What did I make you for, if not to stand above everyone else?"
Shut up. Yoichi's legs were swept out from her, landing face first in the dirt. Again. Get up. She began again, her fingers throbbing as she continued to loose arrows while she maneuvered through the course.
"You want to be like him, don't you? Changing your goal so you can slink around in the shadows, being a nobody. How well did that go for your hero, hmm?"
A wooden beam took her in the back of the head, and Yoichi was flung down again. Get up! You need to be faster! Better at dodging! You don't need to stand out. You just need to be the Hero-
"-that you want to be, right? You wanted to be a Hero like your dear Nocturne, hmm? Confined to the shadows, unable to progress as others surged past him, until he just winds up de-"
"SHUT UP!"
Yoichi spun, loosed an arrow at the shade of her mother who stood there, smirking, until the shaft passed through her chest. The apparition wavered and vanished, leaving Yoichi breathing heavily and with blood dripping down the side of her face. The arrow had landed a perfect bullseye, right where her mother's heart would have been. She shut her eyes, jaw clenched, shaking with anger.
"It's not your life! It's mine... and I want to be the kind of Hero that lays down his life to protect others. Nocturne... I doubt he even flinched! So shut up and let me train!"
Yoichi took a deep breath. A voice whispered by her ear as she turned back to the course.
"Oh yes... you keep working hard, little Yoichi. What will you do when I find out you've abandoned your dreams? I made you for one purpose... and if you aren't willing to follow that purpose, then you are worth nothing to me."
Yoichi clenched her hands, then took a deep breath before she started again.
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cmd1095
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Post by cmd1095 on May 12, 2024 17:24:00 GMT
Shizo had been coming to train today as well, intending to do it solo like he usually did. He had done much of his usual routine, squats, sprints, marathon running, weight training, all of the usual body building stuff to maintain his toned physique. But he knew he needed to actually work on his combat skills, a recent incident had shown that he had two options ahead of him if he wanted to stay on the hero path. He either needed to get over his phobia entirely and be able to use his quirk without restraint, or he needed to get a lot better at hand to hand combat.
So he'd come to get some Mu ren zhueng dummies, they were disconcertingly similar to what he'd fought with that villain. An endless array of wooden limbs attacking him, no matter how many he took down another came at him to take it's place. The memory made him tense up and his hands spark with energy. He'd been overwhelmed entirely, protecting Atsuro from that horde of puppets, if the villain's quirk had been remote puppeteering instead of using metal wires that he could conduct electricity through... He shook his head, no use dwelling on that, he just needed to train, to get so good at his martial arts that no number of enemies could pressure him like that again. Ideally he'd get over his fears too, but that was a long term issue, this one was more immediate.
Grabbing a cart of the dummies, he wheeled it out to a training field that seemed to be meant for them, judging by the number of them already there. When he arrived though, he found he wasn't alone. That was his classmate there right? Yoichi... had she reserved this area? Damn, well he could go to the next one ove...
"SHUT UP!"
Shizo flinched at the sudden shout, oh come on he hadn't even said anything! He knew she was a prickly person but this was uncalled for! He turned to call her out on it, but the rest of her tirade made him stop short
"It's not your life! It's mine... and I want to be the kind of Hero that lays down his life to protect others. Nocturne... I doubt he even flinched! So shut up and let me train!"
Wait... was she... she wasn't even aware of his presence yet, which meant those words. Was there anyone else here? Nope... so she was talking to herself, saying words that sounded so familiar. Thinking back on what he'd observed of her, he'd gotten the sense her home life wasn't great, but she'd never said anything to confirm that her prickly personality was because of anything like that. It had more just been a vibe he picked up as someone from a shitty home himself. He had never pried though, it wasn't his business, so he'd left it alone.
Hearing a line like that though... he sighed. Well he was far from qualified to actually be of any help, but he couldn't just pretend he'd heard nothing after that. Something in him just couldn't turn his back on this, if Yoichi came from the same kind of family as him, he had to at least try. "oh damn it all... well here goes." he muttered as he wheeled his equipment fully into the grounds. Coming into Yoichi's line of sight
"Hey Yoichi, uh... sorry to interrupt." he said awkwardly "guess we both had the same idea huh? Haha... so... who were you shouting at just now?"
Great... an opener as smooth as sandpaper that was. What was he even supposed to say? 'Hey Yoichi just overheard you screaming at the air saying things that echo my own experiences and I just wanted to pry into your emotional issues and try to support you like some sort of really shitty therapist?' Fuck why was he even doing this he wasn't qualified to help someone with shit like this! But he'd started the conversation, and no matter how much he wanted to leave well enough alone he just couldn't help it. Some part of him deep down just couldn't ignore someone suffering, beneath all the learned apathy and cynicism and awkwardness and emotional repression and everything... that shout had been of someone truly suffering... he couldn't walk away.
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Post by Beriadan on May 15, 2024 11:21:38 GMT
Yoichi turned slightly, giving Shizo an incredibly strong side-eye, communicating the same level of anger and contempt he had seen at the entrance exam. Then she sighed deeply, from the bottom of her soul it seemed. Shizo could see the bruising on her fingers as she withdrew her bow, the blood that she was wiping from her face that had come from using her Quirk so much. Yoichi was obviously training hard, pushing her limits beyond what her body was comfortable with. Whatever was ailing her was obviously big.
"Nobody. Just the wind."
She grabbed a bottle of water, taking deep gulps from it. Then she turned back to Shizo, eyes still wary, but not filled with the same hatred from before. That had been her mother's hatred. Anger instilled into her by years of mental pressure. Now... Yoichi was trying to figure out what she actually thought about her classmates. It had started with Kachiya, but she was slowly opening up to the idea of not shutting them out. She lowered the bottle from her lips, letting a long silence stretch out between them. Then she motioned at the dummies with her draw hand.
"It's fine. I was just trying to push myself. It's easier when I don't have competition, but I don't mind if you want to try."
Yoichi was looking away, brow furrowed. She was thinking deeply about something, but whatever it was, it wasn't immediately apparent. The aura of attitude and contempt wasn't around her today. It was as if something fundamentally had changed within Yoichi, even if she didn't realise it. She turned her eyes back to Shizo, watching him with some other expression. Intrigue, maybe? Or a level of curiosity? She girl turned fully towards Shizo, her eyes hard and her words direct.
"Why didn't you use your Quirk properly, during the appraisal tests?"
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cmd1095
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Post by cmd1095 on May 16, 2024 15:47:28 GMT
Shizo started to regret his decision almost immediately as he was met with a death glare, but it faded fast... guess she wasn't angry at him then. Looking her over as she drank water... he could tell she was overexerting herself. If she kept training like this she was going to get hurt, all his suspicions and bad feelings about her general attitude were becoming more and more solidified every time they interacted it seemed.
Her question came a bit out of the blue though, back then he'd given a pretty reasonable explanation as to simply not having thought of ways for his quirk to be useful for those physical fitness oriented tests. Being able to flash fry something with lightning didn't exactly help with running or jumping necessarily. He'd tried to work it into things after she gave some ideas, but it still wasn't exactly a physical enhancement quirk at it's core. His physical fitness was a tool to enhance how well he could use his quirk not the other way around.
But this gave him an opportunity. Maybe if he opened up about his own parental issues, if she really was suffering the same way, it could prompt her to open up too.
Shizo hesitated a bit, then rolled up his sleeve, showing the Lichtenburg scars covering his arm "There was... an incident. My parents birthed me for the sole purpose of achieving their dreams of heroism and getting rich off it because they couldn't do it themselves. And they trained me relentlessly from the moment I could make as much as a few sparks with my quirk. One day the training went too far, and I got hurt by my quirk, badly." he said "ever since I've had a phobia of it, it's irrational, I know that unless I get struck by lightning again the odds of my quirk overloading like that again are slim to none. But knowing that logically doesn't make a difference. So I've been trying to use my quirk in ways that don't trigger the phobia while I work with the school therapists on it... plus there was the stuff I told you back in the tests, I really wasn't sure how best to use it for most of those tests."
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Post by Beriadan on Sept 17, 2024 21:08:00 GMT
Yoichi watched Shizo with more of that curious gaze. Then she turned away abruptly, raising her bow and drawing several arrows, firing them off in quick succession.
"Hmph."
Blood dripped from her fingers as she stared across the distance between her and the training dummies. The arrows had struck exactly where she wanted. Yoichi glowered at them. Not good enough. Not good enough. It would never be good enough.
"So why do you want to be a Hero, if you're scared of your power, and your parents forced you into it?"
Yoichi lowered her bow, turning towards Shizo again. She was watching his every move, calculating and intense.
"It's your Quirk, isn't it? Are you really only here because your parents forced you into it? Tch. I don't believe that."
She shook her head violently, fervently. Pot calling the kettle black, perhaps, but she didn't care. Yoichi wasn't looking to see someone else fall into the same trap she had.
"You don't strike me as the kind of person who would let others walk all over them. You probably have the strongest Quirk in class, yet your resolve just isn't there. Tell me why you want to be a Hero, truthfully."
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Post by cmd1095 on Sept 18, 2024 15:07:28 GMT
Shizo took a few moments to ponder his answer. In truth he hadn't fully hammered out what he really wanted yet, he hadn't had much time to figure that out. But Yoichi was right that he wasn't just here because he was being forced. It was a part of it yes, but the fact he went through the trouble of maintaining appearances to he didn't get pulled out of the program and sent to a different hero school couldn't be ignored.
The best he could do was draw on the one formative experience he had for this answer, the run in with that marionette villain. "There's a lot of factors why, for one thing I don't want to be afraid of my quirk forever. That's something I'm working on. And to be honest, when I first showed up that and my situation with my parents was the bulk of it. I figured I'd find a reason to care as I went... and I was right. I did."
Shizo felt anger bubbling up in him at the memory of that night, seeing how broken down Atsuro was from the sheer trauma, seeing Flynn's bloodied body, and the memory of that villain's face. "Now I've seen what happens when villains go unchecked" he said, fist clenching as sparks of electricity danced on the surface of his skin "I've seen the fear and pain they cause when nobody stops them, even when people survive the encounter they end up scarred, sometimes physically, more often emotionally."
"I'm strong, even as I am now. If I can stop villains, save even one person from going through what I saw. That's worth every bit of effort I've gotta put in to make it happen." Shizo concluded "It's not about me, or about my parents. My parents can go rot, and I've never been in this for myself. But like it or not I've been born with power, and that power can be used to save many others, and stop many villains. So I'll do what it takes."
Shizo let his anger subside, letting out a slow exhale "That doesn't explain what's got you so motivated though. I can see from here the blood dripping from your fingers from how much you're training, and you haven't missed a shot even while talking to me so clearly you're about as perfect an archer as you can be. People don't do that unless something or someone's lit a fire in them." he said "You've got the opposite problem I've had. You seem to be filled with so much drive that nothing you do can satisfy it, not during class, not during official training, and certainly not now, to the point where it's as self destructive as my lack has been. I've got a gut feeling about what's going on with you, but that's all I've got."
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